Knowledge of Angels

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘Didn’t the Mulet family lose a child to a wolf?’ said a woman Jaime was talking to, to her companion.

  ‘That’s what they said had happened,’ the older woman answered. ‘The poor mite was mauled, certainly.’

  ‘Do you know of a child that vanished utterly, that might have been stolen and not harmed?’ Jaime asked. Nobody did. Guided by the smoke on the distant hillsides, the spread of haze in the clear air, he thanked them and moved on. His wanderings were taking him further and further away from Sant Jeronimo, from the reaches of the mountain pastures that were worked by men of his own town and from the spot where the wolf-child had been found. He had lost hope of success. And then he came upon a larger encampment of burners – they had better than a dozen hearths working, and had cut a wide swathe through the woodlands, taking every oak for a mile or more through the forest. He realized at once that they were strangers, for they spoke with the slight tang of easterners. They were pirates – no landowner had given them a licence to fell and burn, and not for nothing were their fires damped down in daylight and vented at night, and their sites all tucked into a towering fold of the precipice, often wreathed in cloud. Jaime made himself out to be escaping from some scrape with the authorities in the town below, and they accepted him and let him buy his supper by bringing loads of small kindling, working his donkey to and fro between woodcutters and pitstead.

  At dusk they were busy, fanning up the fires and adjusting them. A sheep roasted with succulent fragrance on a spit in the middle of the camp – he did not ask where they got it – and a young girl with bare dirty feet strummed for them on three strings and sang a wild shapeless song. They gathered to eat by moonlight, feeding their children with scraps of fat meat offered on the tips of their knives. Jaime remembered a bottle of wine in the bottom of his pannier, and going to fetch it found it had been stolen. It was already open and going from hand to hand, which did not stop them thanking him for it, handsomely. He chose his moment carefully, between song and song, and asked his question, worn into limpness by his hopelessness of an answer; and there he heard the story that kept him sleepless all night, that had him loading his blanket into his empty panniers and leading his donkey away down the mountainside when dawn was at its first and thinnest illumination and his companions of the night before were still sleeping soundly all around.

  Rafal brought Severo reports from the men he had set to watch Fra Murta. There was no comfort in them – Fra Murta had not been seen visiting prostitutes or taking bribes. He had been preaching his edict of grace from end to end of the island, with inflammatory zeal. ‘It is the same everywhere, Holiness,’ Rafal told him. ‘The quiet, pious folk stay silent, and the miscreants tear their garments and repent and offer to accuse their neighbours . . . What makes them flock to hear him and willingly obey him, when their own priests can barely harry them so far as church on holy days?’

  ‘When he is so loathsome, you mean?’ asked Severo. Rafal hung his head.

  ‘He must be a good preacher,’ said Severo. ‘And he is something new. And they are afraid. They are promised safety in heaven and on earth if they pray loudly and denounce others.’

  ‘Can’t you do something, Holiness?’ Rafal said.

  ‘What would you have me do? He is within his powers. Let him make one mistake – one step too far, however tiny, and I will send him packing. But he will be very careful. He knows I am his enemy, and watchful.’

  ‘Forgive me, Holiness. You seem always to be his friend.’

  ‘He better understands me than you do, it seems,’ said Severo, sighing. ‘Leave me now; I have work to do.’ He returned to his writing. The documents curled and were held down with seals, with his psalter, with his inkstand. He read and signed doggedly. ‘Severo, miseratione divina episcopus Grandinsulensis, Salutem . . .’ When he heard footsteps approaching his door, he bowed his head and wrote faster, hoping to finish one more fiat before the interruption. He expected a clerk with another bundle of placets from the scriptorium, but instead Beneditx entered.

  He was dusty from the road and casting off his outer cloak as he stood there. Severo swept the work aside and, standing, reached out his hands, smiling at his friend.

  ‘Have you convinced him?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Beneditx. He sat down on the edge of Severo’s bed and sank his head in his hands. ‘He has convinced me.’

  28

  ‘They are not sure how long ago – twelve, thirteen, fourteen years back. Their lives are unchanging; one year is the same as another to them.’

  Jaime stood in the cloister garth, talking to the abbess. He came now as a friend, and only Sor Agnete lingered nearby, overhearing.

  ‘About the right time, then. Go on.’

  ‘She came from the valley somewhere, of course, but she didn’t say and they didn’t ask where. She was heavy with child, and it had taken her days, they thought, to climb to their region. She begged for food, and they made her work for it, kneading dough, carrying water. They speak of her with contempt – as a slut.’

  ‘No wedding ring? Of course not. Go on.’

  ‘It seems the charcoal burners have known this to happen repeatedly. A girl comes up to them from one valley, before it shows too much; she swells and gives birth in the mountain, and then takes the babe and goes down into another valley where nobody knows her. She might expose the child, or she might pass herself off as a widow. They reminded me that the sierra is called “the widow maker”.’

  ‘I thought that was because men died of their exploits there.’

  ‘So did I, Mother, but it seems there is this other reason.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Her time came, and she was delivered, lying on the forest floor a little way from the camp. The woman with her was alarmed and went for help. When she returned with others, they found the woman dying and alone. But they saw a wolf, or they think they did, slinking off, moving above them on the open face of the mountain. Two of them could remember this.’

  ‘So we have found her origin? And it does not help us; if she was stolen in her first hour of life, then the cardinal is right, she can have heard no word of God . . .’

  ‘The story fits Amara, Mother,’ said Jaime, ‘in every way but one. The woman bore twins; both were taken. There should have been two of her.’

  ‘There is still faith,’ said Severo. ‘Hold fast to faith . . . can’t you?’ But Beneditx shook his head. An expression of desperation transformed his familiar face.

  ‘I am punished,’ he said, sombrely. ‘Bitterly punished. Simple faith was for others, Severo; I knew better. Reason carried me to the limits of reason’s possibility, I prided myself to think how far that was. God with his gift of faith stooped almost into the pit to reach the understanding of my fellow men, but I ascended scales of understanding and extended my grasp towards him! I was founded on reason. And now the mounting block is kicked away from under me, and without it I cannot mount and ride. I have no strength to gain the saddle of the fine steed that bore me once so proudly! I am falling into the pit.’

  ‘God will see you falling,’ said Severo bravely. ‘He will unfurl the ladder of faith and lower it to where you stand, be it at the gates of hell . . .’ But he was sick at heart.

  ‘Pray for me,’ said Beneditx.

  ‘We will pray together,’ said Severo.

  ‘I cannot pray,’ said Beneditx. ‘I am afraid the whole sky is empty, and no-one hears our voice . . .’

  ‘I have done this to you,’ Severo said. ‘I set you to this task, and when you asked me to take it from you, I would not, but set you on to it again. I am to blame.’

  Beneditx shook his head. ‘No, Severo. Each of us must take the blame for his own state of mind. And how could we know what the atheist might say? We had never heard such words spoken and were warmly wrapped with the cloak of faith. I had no idea of the force of the wind. But, for example, how could one answer . . .’

  ‘Do not tell me what he said,’ said Severo. ‘Or I
too might lose my footing. We will pray together, now, all night. That void you speak of, that unanswering empty sky, is your God for this hour, and you will pray to it, if none other be there for you. Come, I command it.’

  Face down, side by side on the marble floor before the high altar of the cathedral, the two men lay in the deepening darkness. The clergy sung vespers and retired, the candles lit by the faithful below the images of the saints guttered one by one into darkness. At some time in the long hours between vespers and prime, Severo’s outstretched hand reached the outstretched hand of his suffering friend and held it.

  In the morning Severo did two things. He sent Beneditx home. ‘Back to the Galilea, Beneditx. Finish that treatise on the knowledge of angels. Finish it in peace.’

  ‘But what will you do with Palinor?’ Beneditx asked.

  ‘Think of him no more,’ said Severo. ‘I command you not to think of him.’

  When Beneditx had gone, Severo sat reflecting. He was appalled to think of the damage he had done; heart-sick at the misery into which Beneditx was cast. What had he thought he was doing, trying to outmanoeuvre an inquisitor, who should have had his fervent support? How had he come to value the safety of a blasphemous heretic above that of a great doctor of theology? Sunk in self-loathing, he reproached himself. How had it happened that he, Severo, had spent his whole life in the service of the Church and then failed in diligence the very first time something was asked of him that he found difficult?

  In an impulse of remorse and rage, he enquired where Fra Murta was to be found, and learning that he was now promulgating his edict of grace in the streets of Ciudad, he sent for him and gave Palinor into his hands.

  ‘Were you always alone, Amara? Did you have a companion in the snows?’

  It seemed most likely the other babe had died – was it not incredible enough that either one had survived such rigours? But the abbess was asking, just the same. A lingering hope that perhaps the snow-child was not one of those hapless twins but someone else, someone who got lost late enough to take human knowledge with her . . .

  ‘Yes,’ Amara said. ‘Me, and her. Two of us, long while.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I killed her,’ she said.

  ‘Holy Mother of God!’ said the abbess, breaking for the first time her solemn oath. ‘Why?’

  ‘Not remember why,’ Amara said.

  29

  Fra Murta arrived at Alquiera at midday. He had a band of pious laymen with him, carrying staves. They prayed as they rode, incanting strings of invocation. Fervour burned in their noonlit eyes. They found Palinor drowsing in a hammock on his balcony, with a book upturned on his belly and his hand dangling, slack fingers trailing on the marble pavement as his hammock swayed.

  ‘Get up!’ said Fra Murta, standing over him, taking the book. His eyes narrowed as he saw it was St Augustine’s Civitate Dei. Palinor opened his eyes and stared sleepily at the dark-clad figure looming over him.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, whereupon Fra Murta’s stout fellows tipped him out of his hammock and pinioning his arms forced him to his knees at Fra Murta’s feet. Holding him down, they pummelled him with feet and knees. Joffre came at a run and hurled himself on his master’s assailants, but he was easily beaten back. He came again, half blind with blood from a running cut on his forehead and screaming. Suddenly forcing himself half-upright and looking round, Palinor cried, ‘Stop, Joffre!’ and the boy stood back against the wall. Palinor was being manhandled down the stairs.

  At the foot of the stairs Fra Murta met with a hold-up. The estate servants were massed in the courtyard, standing several deep at every door, solidly filling the archway. The blacksmith stood below the doorway arch, in front of the crowd. He just happened to be holding his forge hammer. At his shoulder stood the butcher, who happened to be holding his boning knife. Fra Murta’s men were heavily outnumbered. They dropped Palinor and came to a halt.

  ‘I have a warrant to arrest this man on charges of heresy,’ said Fra Murta, loudly. ‘Excommunication awaits any who obstruct me.’

  ‘Show us the warrant,’ said the blacksmith.

  ‘My friend, you wouldn’t know an Inquisition warrant from a receipt for pudding,’ said Fra Murta scornfully. ‘Stand aside.’

  ‘Not until we see your papers, Brother,’ the blacksmith said. He swung his hammer idly as he spoke. Muscles rippled in his massive arms.

  Fra Murta held out a parchment. At once a little clerk darted out from under the blacksmith’s arms, took it, and retreated. The crowd murmured. ‘What does it say, Mattheo?’ the butcher called out.

  ‘It is a warrant,’ said Mattheo, reluctantly. ‘It arrests him to stand question.’

  ‘Does it say he is to be beaten by ruffians?’ asked the blacksmith.

  ‘Not a word about that,’ piped up Mattheo.

  ‘A blow for a blow, then – huzzah!’ shouted the blacksmith, and he led a surge of the crowd forward to set upon the gang Fra Murta had brought with him. There was an ugly zest to it. Palinor struggled towards the well in the centre of the yard and scrambled on to the windlass cover above it. ‘Hear me!’ he shouted. ‘Hear me!’

  The mayhem was suspended for a moment. ‘Thank you,’ Palinor said. ‘But take care not to share my danger. If the warrant is good, I must go with this man sooner or later. Ask him to let me put a shirt and mantle on, and let him go with me.’

  Thus it was that Fra Murta rode back into Ciudad with a tatterdemalion escort of bruised rough-arms, caked with drying blood, black-eyed and broken-nosed, sore-buttocked and groaning in their saddles, and bringing a man riding in a clean shirt of fine linen, wrapped in a deep blue mantle and crowned with flowers.

  Behind them as they rode, the blaze of sunset dropped behind the mountains, and the road ahead was cast into shadow. The walls of the city could be made out a distance before them, built in battlemented shadow and overtopped by towers and spires whose uppermost tips stood high enough to burn with the fiery touch of the last fingers of the sinking sun. Suddenly a river of light ran out of the gate towards them, flowing to meet them along the curve of the last mile. A few more minutes’ riding, and faintly there came towards them voices – a great choir of voices singing.

  Fra Murta was riding alongside Palinor. Ahead of them the river of light divided, resolving itself into the spectacle of hundreds and hundreds of torches, carried by singers who stood lining the roadway left and right. To Palinor, whose nerves were stretched tight by fear now, they seemed the strangest vision. They were clad in dark garments that obliterated their bodies in the shadows. The torches they carried cast lurid light upon their heads and faces – their faces floating, of the hue of molten metal in the furnace, their tresses curling like the lick of fire – their eye-sockets pools of shadow, and in their eyes leaping flamelets of reflected torches, echoing their neighbours’ light. Left and right they lined the roadway, singing and crossing themselves as the riders passed.

  At the entrance to the city the riders were confronted by a narrow street so packed with torch-bearers that it was hopeless to think of riding forward; uneasy at the ring of fire, the horses snorted, and started. With a word to the gate-keeper, Fra Murta turned aside. Coaxing the horses up the steps, they rode up on to the city wall and began to move along it. Below them the streets of Ciudad were mapped in fire. Plumes of light moved slowly in every alleyway, flowed in every street, massed in every square, fusing in blazing pools. The roofs between were quagmires of shadow, the churches were shapes of darkness, their outlines flickering in the moving illumination from below. A sonorous bell from the cathedral tolled relentlessly, and the spires and pinnacles and gargoyles of the cathedral appeared as in a mist, faintly through the smoke, smelling of tar and lit from below like the miasma of a bonfire. The voices brimmed in the streets below and overflowed, reaching the riders from many directions, unsynchronized and blended together, deep voices, and the soaring notes of boys, tune and words alike indecipherable.

  As th
e turns of the wall brought them round nearer and nearer to the cathedral, the singing resolved itself, the voices of the vast crowd in the cathedral square sounding together. The riders dismounted to descend to the cathedral cloister. Palinor made out the words of the endlessly repeated singing: Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom . . .

  ‘What is that they are singing?’ he asked Fra Murta.

  ‘It is the prayer of the Good Thief,’ Fra Murta told him. ‘He who repented at the last minute.’

  ‘And what is happening? What festival is this?’

  ‘It is a day of special prayer. Of petition for a special intention. The Inquisition is empowered to offer strong indulgences to everyone who takes part. Every person in that crowd has fasted all day today, and will carry torches and walk in pilgrimage, going from church to church all night.’

  ‘And what are they praying for?’

  ‘For you,’ said Fra Murta.

  ‘For me?’

  ‘That you may escape the fire.’

  Palinor stood speechless, staring at the enormity of the myriad moving lights below him. ‘That I may escape?’ he said at last, extending a hand to encompass the scene below.

  ‘The fire in the next world, we mean,’ said Fra Murta grimly. ‘The fire in this world you have no chance of escaping.’

  30

  ‘The child has been forgiven,’ said Pare Aldonza. The elderly chaplain was trying to comfort the abbess. The old lady was trembling and tearful. Her clouded eyes watered, and her gnarled hands shook on her sticks.

  ‘But . . . murder!’ she said.

  ‘Yes; she has been forgiven murder. Old friend, collect yourself. The cardinal baptized her after the time of her captivity. She has been baptized in the blood of Christ, washed in the blood of the Lamb, and stands spotless in the eyes of her saviour. No sin can follow her across the water of Jordan. You know all this well. Be calm. Remember your faith in the Lord Jesus.’